The tiny robot space bugs developed for space station maintenance that led to a new blood monitoring system

Tiny robot space bugs sound like the last thing you would want anywhere near your blood, but they may offer a breakthrough in testing patients being treated for blood clots.

The technology behind electro-mechanical creatures designed to work in future space stations has been adapted to develop a simple, home-use testing kit that can detect problems in patients' circulation.

Fifteen years ago as a graduate student, Vladislav Djakov started building these robots that mimic the swarms of bugs found in nature.

Prototypes of the space bugs designed to monitor fluids in space station pipes. They have a 'brain' chip, battery and mechanical system used for propulsion

Equipped with a power supply, limited intelligence and monitoring systems, the bugs would be small enough to send en masse to hard-to-reach places, like pipes carrying liquids on space stations.

There, monitoring changes in temperature or flow could warn of impending malfunctions.

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To move the bugs, the scientist hit on using cilia-like motion, much like some deep-sea creatures use to propel themselves. They covered one face of the microchip with tiny cantilever arms.

'They would then move along on these like millipedes,' said Dr Djakov, now Director of Sensor Development at Microvisk Technologies.

In the end, the space bugs were ahead of their time: they haven’t yet progressed past the testing phase.

But the cilia approach – the cantilever arms to propel the bugs – has gone further.

A close-up image made with a scanning electron
microscope of Microvisk's cilia-like micro-cantilevers. Each cantilever
is just 600µ long

STFC Innovation, ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme partner that operates the agency’s Business Incubation Centre Harwell in the UK, saw the business potential in the medical market and supported start-up company Microvisk to spin off the technology.

At Microvisk, Dr Djakov’s team stripped down the microchips and put the intelligent sensing mechanisms right into the cantilever arms, almost like a cat’s whiskers.

These whiskers turned out to be very good at monitoring liquids. Sweeping through, they note changes in viscosity and register if anything is suspended in the liquid.

'This is very interesting for probing blood, plasma, and other bodily fluids,' said Dr Djakov.